Still waiting to see the real Woodstock connection

Published 5:52 pm, Monday, August 31, 2009

There are a lot of comparisons between this weekend's Gathering of the Vibes in Bridgeport's scenic Seaside Park and that huge, hulking, unwieldy cultural landmark called Woodstock, held 40 years ago in Bethel, N.Y.

The relative sizes -- 20,000 here and 400,000 there -- isn't one of them.

Nor is the political pressure cooker, which prompted the generational roar back then that's reverberating here like a little wave lapping on the Seaside sands; like Jerry Garcia's voice singing "Morning Dew" this evening from beyond the grave, as the crowds decamp.

The party atmosphere is here; the random kindnesses of sharing food, booze and Band-Aids with strangers; loud rock 'n' roll music; marijuana smoke floating in blue curtains above the shoulder-to-shoulder masses shouting their responses to the calls from the stage.

It's all there at Seaside Park, as tie-dyed, tattooed 21st Centurians from up and down the East Coast spend a weekend together camping along tranquil Long Island Sound in a troubled city.

The unpopular war halfway across the world that galvanized a generation against a president? Well, not so much, if at all.

In preparation for diving into the Vibes throngs in this anniversary year, I just gave a relisten to the original Woodstock soundtrack.

Nearly half the recording features songs against the Vietnam War. "Oh come on all of you big strong men," Country Joe McDonald chanted, "Uncle Sam needs your help again "¦ And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for?"

In 1969, the draft was in full force, still sending young men of all socioeconomic strata to the jungles. I was on a demographic vector to get swallowed up in it.

But the growing opposition to the Selective Service system was working against the purported effort to stop the falling dominoes of Communism in Southeast Asia.

By the time Stamford High's class of 1972 graduated, the draft was effectively rendered moot by the war's unpopularity. Henry Kissinger, Richard M. Nixon's Machiavellian secretary of state, lied that "Peace is at hand" and helped his boss win re-election in a landslide over George McGovern.

More than 58,000 U.S. troops died in Vietnam, which we finally left in 1975. That's nearly three times the number of this weekend's Seaside Park partiers. The Iraq and Afghanistan death toll is up above 5,000.

Now, in an age when college can cost $50,000 a year, the military can merely let the economy do its recruiting for the roadway mines and firefights of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I was 15 that summer of '69, trying to pull my batting average up toward .200 in Stamford's National Babe Ruth League, oblivious to the hundreds of thousands of older kids rocking out in a cow pasture, until I read the accounts of the festival that exploded off the front page of The New York Times.

I was just a little too young to get excited about Woodstock, but within a year, around the time that Ohio National Guard troops killed four students at Kent State, it would all change.

I'd get a weekend and summer job cleaning dog and cat cages; buy a phonograph and records by the Beatles, the Who, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Woodstock soundtrack and Crosby, Still, Nash and Young, whose Dejà Vu album became a touchstone.

I can still remember the first time I put it on the turntable. The racing guitar intro, then the halting harmony separated by the stereo speakers: "One morning, I woke up and I knew you were gone "¦ Love is coming to us all "¦"

It wasn't too long before I checked out the big rock festivals of that bygone era: the Poconos in 1972; Watkins Glen in 1973; Woodstock '94, where at age 40, I finally saw Bob Dylan and Aerosmith and Green Day (wow!) for the first times.

I don't listen much anymore to any of those '60s and '70s bands, including Crosby, Stills and Nash, who'll be headlining today's closing festivities. They're part of the canon, part of my genetic makeup. I prefer bluegrass and acoustic music, the occasional Boston Symphony summer concert up at Tanglewood.

But I'm still searching for the harmony, musical and political, that was so affecting in the shallows of my teens.

Ken Dixon's Capitol View appears Sundays in Hearst's Connecticut Newspapers. You may each him in the Capitol at 860-549-4670 or via